Last year, I got a mail from a reader who told me I sounded suicidal and asked me if I knew the reasons I wanted to be here. Questions like this, alongside questions like “so, tell me about yourself” are those questions that you tend to have imaginary answers to until someone asks you to speak about them and you realize, “oh shit, I never actually thought about this”. And since I am not good at improvising answers to unexpected questions, I was too taken aback to provide an intelligible reply. But the question itself has remained in my mind ever since, and since it was asked, it deserves to be answered. I’ll try to do that now.
I am neither depressed nor happy, but I have come to believe the world may be “more bad” than good. Those who tend to have contrary opinions may not have experienced the travesties of the world or the horrors of life up to the stories of a neighbor of mine. I’ve met people who smoked an awful lot, but this guy was just different. I once woke up in the middle of the night to find him sitting in the middle of the hostel smoking. I sat with him and he had gone on about how he felt life was meaningless. People die every day, and that is just the end of them. And it never seems to matter when they die, because in the end, no one wins, one side just loses more slowly. I understood his reservations and pressed him a little more to realize that being the only child, he lost his parents when he was five. A car accident. I had asked him if he wanted a family or kids in the future and he had told me no. He was, on his own admission, a lonely man who avoided any form of intimacy. Some sort of solitary thinker, difficult to know as a human being. But according to him, this wasn’t the reasons he avoided relationships; he didn’t want any of it because he felt being with someone doesn’t make you any less alone facing your own death. The conversation had continued for a while after which I had left him to continue smoking his weed in peace but anytime I looked at him after that day, I couldn’t help but wonder how he always pulled off a smile. Because considering the life he’s had, you couldn’t blame him for thinking that if he knew one thing for sure, it was that there was no reason for him to continue living. He had lost everything before he knew he had them. He had seen far too much to make him not want to have anything either. From the look of things, there wasn’t anybody he wanted to thank for his weed, but he was somehow grateful that he was still alive to smoke it. Which is something in itself because choosing to breathe in and out sounds like a choice he had to make every day.
I remember I had to travel back to Lagos when some strange thing will happen to him. He had suffered a stroke, and it was crazy because this guy wasn’t even twenty-five. They said the doctors had tried their best to revive him. But you know how stories like this end… it never matters when it is death’s time to shine.
When I heard the news of his death, I had processed it like the death of every other person I knew that had died before him by not processing it. I mean fuck, my best friend had just taken his life. It was the reason I traveled to Lagos in the first place and death had dumped another body at my feet. I did what I knew best by piling the bodies in my brain till the Army gunned down peaceful protesters at Lekki. The night of the massacre, I experienced something in the guise of a panic attack. And I can’t tell for sure, if it was the blood, or watching so many people lose their lives at once, but whatever it was, my system came crashing down. At that point I recognized almost everything about him, up to the conversations we’d had. He was a good guy, like everyone I know, he lies, but man, he was a good guy. Once, he told me he never had a three-square meal and after I told him he could have channeled all the money he spends buying weed into making that a reality, he had smiled and shrugged, not so much as if he didn’t know that was the smart thing to do but more like it didn’t matter. And maybe everything never matters in the end because one day he was here and the next day he wasn’t. I never got the chance to tell him I didn’t believe the “three square meal stuff”, that it just sounded too good to not be a lie, which just reinforces the one thing about death. That if it comes, whenever it does, it never matters that you never had a three-square meal, wouldn’t matter that you were the bread winner, that you were at a protest fighting to not be killed or that you were young and had plans.
Nowadays, I smile less than I used to. Not because it seems like everyone is dying and the worlds’ going to shit, but because of the damning reality of mine, that I just can’t seem to shake off. There is nothing beautiful about contemplating your death. It is very troubling. From experience, I realize it is easy to think about death and say stuff like, “you will live everyday like it is your last”, but to actually believe in your own death, that is a completely different ball game. And that is exactly what you should be afraid of, or what you should never try to know. Because the moment you understand this, like really understood what it meant for you to die, you lose your will to be happy. Happiness becomes a luxury, a joke you had no room for once you knew what it was like to work so hard all your life only to die because you slipped in the bathroom. All dreams, hopes and aspirations gone, because you took one wrong step. Some dreaded poverty, and worked hard for money. Some despised submission, and chased power. Some feared loneliness and found love. Then there is me, most of the time thinking, “man, what’s the fucking point of all this? I don’t want to die”.
Whenever this thought left, things were different. I was just like everyone else, lying awake at night worrying about what was going to become of me, yelling in traffic, pissed about my favorite football team and punching my keyboard hard as I tried to meet a deadline, but the thoughts always came back. And every time it did, I was always weary afterward, so empty of everything that I couldn’t recall the feelings, except knowing it was like something I had felt before. It remained obscure for a long time, but after enough times, everything took shape. It turns out there is some contradiction in the center of my existence. And the reason I have been avoiding facing it head on, is because it is something I don’t want to know. But time will not make a shoe comfortable if it doesn’t fit, and if only I had realized that I was better off bare footed, I could have made peace with my reality a long time ago, with the one true answer to all this chaos, that life is a tragedy without a moral, some joke without a point.
Sometimes I couldn’t live with the purposelessness of everything, and I was so pissed at God (if he exists). And sometimes the only reason I wasn’t angry at him was because I didn’t have the energy. Anytime I found myself in this mood, I had no choice than to submit to the sadness, allowing it to have its fun. Sometimes I came to love my life, to love and respect the mere fact that I just existed, but often, the feeling never stayed for long. Being “happy” for me, often meant having things to do and fulfilling them. No wonder everyone wanted kids. Because you could wake up six in the morning, some morning after you have cried yourself to sleep, only to realize that tomorrow it could happen. Tomorrow could be the day you die. And you have been raw dogging life all this while without a purpose. Now you need a reason to stand up from that bed and you’ve got none. You don’t have a kid whose future you are so desperate to protect. Man, you could just lie there all day, sweating in the dampest chill you have ever felt.
I am not seriously suicidal. I am writing this as one who has had what we must regard until recently, as a happy life. The past year, I have found myself in therapy, found solace in the gym, and taken so many non-paying jobs than I can do, which together has set me firmly on the long, boring ascent to my present contentment with life. At some point, I undertook the task of falling in love with a girl I met online. A girl I had literally no idea what she looked like. And when it didn’t serve its purpose any longer, I helped my friends with their projects. And you know what I felt when I was done with every single project? Happiness, knowing I was done with it. BoJack Horseman was right, the road to happiness is to keep yourself busy with unnecessary stuff till you die. And I know the insinuations of everything I just said, I am aware these might be the traits of misery. Nevertheless, the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the best thing I can do about the questions of life, about if living is better than dying, is to take things for granted. And how do I know this is best for me? Of course, in the end, I will never know. How do you know you are not living in a dream? You simply take it for granted that some things may be true. You take it for granted that you are crazy in the world of the insane. You take it for granted that you are going to hell in someone else’s religion. You take it for granted that you are living to die. That’s all you ever need to do; take things for granted. This is the least interesting part to living, but it is everything you need to be sane.
Before I started this piece, I re-read the piece I wrote on this day last year. And the future I want remains the same except for some minor tweaks. I have never been interested in riches; I still am not, but I realize its absolute necessity for a decent life anywhere in this world. I am not really hyped about living, but I also don’t want to die. And maybe it is impossible to want to be alive and to desire death inside the same instant, but sometimes those feelings alternated so fast that I could barely tell what I wanted. Every so often, the feelings were intense enough to make me doubt the beliefs I hold. Maybe I would want to get married in the future? Or maybe I would mysteriously want kids. I doubt any of this would happen, but you never can tell. This was the biggest lesson life taught me the past year, that I could never predict how I would react until I have to.
And when the time came for me to react, I didn’t know how I was supposed to. How are you supposed to react to your best friend taking his life, or to some young guy who wasn’t even 25 dying cause of a stroke? You just suck it up, try not to think about it, hoping to move on. But for every step you took forward, something in you dies. And for me, it was everything. The will to do anything, the willingness to live and the will to be happy. And bro, it was crazy. It is crazy how one incident can alter the story of your life forever. Initially, I could have sworn things were going to be okay. Then came the depression — The serious type. Serious enough that I couldn’t leave home for months, but not the extreme type which made people say stuff like, “fuck it, I am getting a rope”. And it sucked. Every single day I woke up sucked. But then again, I am extremely lucky enough to have family. And by family, I mean anyone I can count on. They are the reason I am here.
This is a toast to them. To the people who love me.
It’s past midnight, and I have got this done on time. I am listening to “pursuit of happiness” by Kid Cudi, arguably my favorite song in the world, and in this moment, everything is okay. Happy birthday to me.
